what is the force at the heart of life what is the engine that drives it forward it links all living things from the smallest to the largest that links families through generations and looks and personality the health then ensues scientists in search for the answer for hundreds of years until 1953 when two young men ran into a British pub shouting that they discovered the secret of life the most beautiful girl on the world you're gonna see her again it was great the secret was DNA a microscopic strand of only four chemicals but capable of such infinite variety that it carries the blueprint and directs the growth of every living thing on earth the genetic revolution was about to begin for the next 50 years whole new fields of science and technology burst into being as our understanding of the genetic code buried in DNA grew going to transform everything just to the bare surfaces but strange will never be the same there were hopes for healthier lives that stuff kept me alive and keeping me alive right now promises of an end to inherited disease I think I've mapped the gene for inherited breast cancers ass off of the Prado have this anything I'm gonna cure cancer the excitement of discovery dizzying sometimes when I start to talk about it I get Judy scientists like falling in the way I just want to work all the time I don't want to go home and the fear of scientists playing God contamination of the most dangerous and happiest experiment we're worried about them a fall out of the laboratory such as a Frankenstein if we don't play God who will even the course of human evolution may soon be ours to control this is potentially the most important organized scientific effort that the human species has ever mounted aspects of society will never be the same again this is the personal story of the scientists whose struggles and breakthroughs are transforming our biological future the first generation to live and work in the age of DNA this is a hard call up to go home gel pleat working template the most intense hostility impetuous discussion selfish bastard was like running a marathon race that lasts for four years it's absolutely fascinating the DNA story begins more than half a century ago with a group of brilliant competitive and temperamental young scientists all driven to uncover the same elusive mystery and with Francis Crick and James Watson to complete unknowns who somehow found what they were all looking for the secret of life [Music] to appreciate what Watson and Crick did we have to imagine we're in the 1950s and all that is known about life is what can be seen through a microscope [Music] cell was dividing they divide and divide again until somehow they eventually form a plant penguin or a person but how how do the cells know what to do most believe there was a magical life force that would forever elude science but some had faith in a more rational answer to tell the story of how the extraordinary breakthrough was made one has to come to Cambridge University in England it's a place where many great discoveries have been made during the past seven hundred years but if the place has the hallmarks of greatness Watson and Crick did not today Francis Crick has a house on the edge of the Mojave Desert in California and he's become a little reclusive when it comes to discussing the early days of DNA some say it's because he's ill others say he finds the whole subject uncomfortable or maybe he's just busy with his more recent work studying the chemical nature of dreams whatever the reason he rarely gives interviews but Jim Watson does today he's 74 years old world famous and a multimillionaire but he was just a 22 year old junior researcher when he set out to explain life in scientific terms still all these years later one gets a sense of the brash young man who is planning to overthrow the old ways of thinking if you looked at Cambridge you know we were products of God the statement that life could be understood finally in terms of molecules people say was hypothesis Francis I what United us is I wish yourself religion was wrong let us say silly but wrong George no God and your humans had to make our own rules and not for just the bay rules because someone said they came from God who realized that you know the people no software were slightly crazy and but we didn't think we were without the other people were doubt dull or not the other people at Cambridge didn't hold out much hope of Watson and Crick doing anything at all let alone finding the secret of life Watson this geeky American kid with his friend Crick who acted like some dandy English gentleman a splendid talker who had never quite managed to finish his ph.d they were seen as lazy Jokers but they shared the same dream like other scientists of the time they believed that there was some kind of a script or instruction that told cells what to do the search for this script focused on the chromosomes right in the middle of every cell but that was as far as they could see still it was known that chromosomes were made of two discrete ingredients proteins and DNA most scientists expected to find the script in the proteins because they're really complicated and made up of lots of different chemicals so they distracted the best minds but Watson and Crick decided to look at the simpler DNA DNA is composed of only four ingredients they thought if they could work out how the atoms of these four ingredients were arranged in physical space they might be able to work out what they did they had a hunch that the three-dimensional structure of DNA might reveal its function but while Watson and Crick had never found the structure of anything 60 miles away in London worked another pair of scientists who had rosalind Franklin and Morris Wilkins rosalind Franklin is often seen as the heroine of this story she was Jewish from a wealthy background and had attended the best schools in England she had chosen to become an expert in taking photographs of things that are too small to see she's been called the Dark Lady of DNA as she died without ever getting credit for her part in the discovery some say she was betrayed by her colleague at King's College London if you go to King's along a remote corridor and down these stairs 50 years later you'll still find that colleague Morris Wilkins and on the walls of his office are clues which hint at what he's been through during the Second World War he helped to create the atom bomb the night it was dropped on Hiroshima he was at a party celebrating the culmination of that work when a man came up to him and said something that would change his life it was being Monday when the bomb went off and he said I call it Black Monday I always hoped it wouldn't work I sort of stood there I felt a bit small and and said yes I think you think you're quite right but he did work and so we are living kind of in the aftermath of that disillusioned with the science of death he chose the science of life instead and that's why he decided to look for the structure of DNA here is one of the x-ray generators we're using in this it is the x-ray tube Wilkins II strange contraption is in fact a kind of camera it's used in a technique called x-ray crystallography a crystalline form of DNA is placed inside the camera and when x-rays are fired through it they scatter onto photographic paper and form a regular pattern it's a bit like shining a spotlight at a chandelier light hits the crystals and then diffracts onto the wall now imagine you can't see the chandelier you can only see the light on the wall from that you have to guess the shape of the chandelier and that's what these photographs are taken by Mars Wilkins they were the first clue to the structure of DNA but his boss realized he was on to something big and decided to bring in an expert rosalind Franklin suddenly it wasn't just Wilkins taking photographs of DNA so Watson and Crick were looking for the structure of DNA in Cambridge and Wilkins and Franklin were doing the same in London but there was someone else lurking out there someone with a formidable reputation [Music] the brilliant American chemist linus pauling he died years ago but his son witnessed the dramatic events and we found him in the middle of Wales miles from the nearest town and this house is Peter Pauling it's very often in science that the times are right and people have different people have the same idea you know at roughly the same time and getting in first somehow is important they were in a race Peter Pauling knew them all and watched this piece of history unfold his father who was about to become a double Nobel Prize winner certainly had the best credentials POD did very few things by accident he did things he had a reason for doing things tappa DNA was just a substance like sodium chloride linus pauling looked for the structures of many molecules and he usually found them too that's why in the world of 1950s science he was one of the most recognizable figures I like to understand the world I like to learn about new ideas but I also like very much having new ideas myself are making discoveries myself this pleases me events like he had a different approach he was going to guess the structure by building ball and spoke models that looked like a child's tinker toy sent the balls represent the atoms the spokes determine how far apart the atoms must be from each other according to the laws of physics Linus Pauling would work at seeing how they fit together solving a structure this way was like doing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle so Watson and Crick had a choice to do the painstaking x-ray work or try their luck building models like Linus Pauling for them the choice was simple and to build models it was only a question when you started to build models would you do it after she collected the years of experimental data or would you try and build the model with a minimum of data they went for model building with the minimum of data some might say a more leisurely approach but that was the Cambridge time and Watson and Crick seem to be the epitome of that wiling away the hours chatting about the secret of life people laugh at us and say oh we weren't doing experiments just take these long walks at lunch and constantly talking it's the extremley play people see do no experiments it was sort of thought you know we were parasites other people did the work and we got the glory but the truth was you know [Music] complicated in fact Watson and Crick we're asking all the right questions what was common dollar forms of life and what finally seemed to be coming to all forms of life was there was a script we've been thinking it was DNA but we didn't know the shape of the script and always the big problem was the copying who copied it there weren't any you know little monks inside the cell copying the script by not getting bogged down in the details of experiments their minds were free to concentrate on the big ideas [Music] three teams three different approaches and Watson and Crick weren't the favourites I would say that Watson and Crick were number two and at that time I would put my money on this ground King's College London should have been the place to find the structure of DNA Kings had cutting-edge equipment and a team of dedicated experts working on the problem but trouble was brewing while Mars Wilkins blended into the shadows rosalind Franklin was making a big impression on those around her she was of medium height and had black hair which she wore straight just in no particular arrangement but she had the most startling dark eyes which showed the intense nature of her personality most of the young men who worked with over half in love with her one of these young men was Raymond Gosling at the time he was a lowly lab assistant working for rosalind Franklin looking back on it I think I was very privileged to have been there I only wish I had known at the time that it was that important I might have remembered more worked harder and who dares I've out have tried building a few models secret three mortal building was in the air but her view was you could build models all day but how did you prove which one was right on the other hand if you made the measurement you did all the corrective geometry and you put them into the equations you would let the data speak for itself and out of that would come a definitive structure but there was a problem Wilkins was under the impression that DNA was his project their boss and told Franklin it was hers no mention was ever made of the fact that Wilkins was the overarching a person concerned in the lab she certainly felt she was coming in she was taking over that defection work so at opposite ends of the corridor maras Wilkins and rosalind Franklin worked on DNA occasionally they would announce their results to the Department one afternoon in November 1951 Franklin was to reveal her latest DNA data to a select group of kings college scientists and one outsider well that's why I came in early November 1951 they had rosalind Franklin talk about her newest results on DNA and as terribly keen to know what she'd done because I had to build a model and I thought I would learn possibly something about the structure there are probably 30 people in the room and you know I slipped in you know was inside us you know like a spy and Roslyn or was seemingly much in control I generally never took notes my memory was good having taken in as much as he could of the x-ray data Watson rushed back to Cambridge to tell Crick what he'd heard for the next two weeks they worked on a model and on November 28th 1951 Watson and Crick announced that they had found the structure of DNA [Music] Francis rang me up and said we made a model come have a look so I went to the others and today we won't wind up it was a pretty ugly structure Francis like that either on the word you know he called off the people with kings is had we done something clever and I was a bit worried feeling apprehensive the Kings team left for cambridge rosalind franklin took one look at the model and she laughed at them ah much to their discomfort sure I think had said oh look you've got it inside out Watson's memory had let him down over how much water was absorbed in the DNA crystals the water content is vital to the structure so their model was a complete disaster Rosalind was tickled pink she was right the building of a model of a crystal structure was a waste of time until you'd let diffraction speak for itself and that was hard work I mean one might say oh why not you mean it's an exploration to make a model and we make a model and she make it better for yourself in the process why what do you might you be lucky truth strength in about Sciences how stupid people can be so much of the time and so precious time for everything stupid worse than that they didn't card the wrath of the London team's bus or John Randall who called up Watson and Crick's bus sir Lawrence Bragg to complain about their behavior and Bragg was furious in those days it wasn't gentlemanly to have knowledge of somebody's current unpublished work and to make use of that working on the same problem it was rather like having an affair with his wife I mean it happened but you you you didn't really take much credit in doing it Watson and Crick were kicked off the case and even their model building equipment was sent to King's Watson and Crick were officially barred from the race the way should have been open for the king's college team but Morris and Rosslyn didn't get along with the stakes so high why couldn't they just resolve their differences Morris was so shy that when he was talking to you and he didn't know you he a bit surely talks at an angle so you might find that you were addressing the back of his head Inc scientists in particular tend to be rather well I don't know sort of bottled up with serious thoughts and and wonderful theories that sir and the secret of life or something he would slide into a room and and unn Mamba something and be very different about it he was never get to come in and say well I'm glad you've joined my team and and and say this is the way we do it spits pop bang which had he done would have cleared the air you know he wasn't able to talk to vote number of people he should have made as more senior made the effort to bring her into the camp and that he sulked in his tent far too often I think he knows this and it's haunted him today rosalind Franklin is an icon outside a dormitory for female students that bears her name stands her statue the only thing that survives that gives a sense of what she was like are her letters in one that she wrote to her religious father she argues for the importance of Science in understanding the world science for me gives a partial explanation of life insofar as it goes it's based on fact experience and experiment your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasant is to believe but as far as I can see they have no foundation other than that they lead to a pleasant view of life and an exaggerated view of our own importance anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith but I maintained that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world the picture to me seemed to say something about Rosalind Rosalind has sometimes seemed a bit sort of heavy in appearance it is I mean not always but sometimes and I I thought well it would have been nice if she'd been able to sort of trip around on her toes and hands a looker pretty and and cheerful but I think it was it was very sad because we had thought we might be all able to join together you see in the scientific work it's that had two sides to the whole thing [Music] you [Music] back in Cambridge watson was down in the dumps banned from working on DNA his dream of showing that it was the secret of life was slipping away but Crick had some good news someone was coming to dinner in Cambridge who could help them your favorite that Darwin chargaff had never intended to help Watson and Crick even at 96 years old he's still bitter about what had happened chargaff was an expert in the chemistry of DNA over dinner Watson and Crick tried to plum him for information they were fishing Katie they but the Sutley I get the impression they did all the time I think Watson really was a fisherman I mean he he sort of brought in used to click Trek was apparently the man who ate the ideas well I think we didn't like him because he sort of didn't you know warm up parsing you know you could solve the structure of DNA by model building you know it was showed an extreme content for chemistry does I see what stuck me even more like children in their behavior no he was just a born enemy despite his extreme dislike for them he did explain his chargaff rules that state the relative amounts of the four basic ingredients of DNA by comparing samples from three different species he discovered a strange correlation no matter what the life-form the amount of a equal the amount of T and the amount of C equal the amount of G this suggested the chemical somehow went together in pairs for chargaff this was an interesting correlation but for Watson and Crick it was the first clue to the structure I think DNA to him was the objective whose time had not yet come oh yes good yes there's a unique an excellent time on this desk is the original equipment that helped reveal the structure of DNA so this is the first camera this is the first DNA it's worth a fortune today I mean putting them in a frame like that they look much better than just sort of lying on a table then the x-ray is going here photographic film is put on the inside yeah then that is put around they you know we thought like everything with Morris there was more to it than meets the eye now you want to say something about these these are small scale models Morris had also wanted to build models based on the x-ray data thing but rosalind had all the best DNA samples and they weren't talking that no one else at King's really had the imagination to help him santaros at Kings if anybody did perhaps see the overarching picture Wilkins did because he often said you know we should all wake up we should all try a number of different things instead of plotting along trying to solve the x-ray diffraction pattern because we are in a race it is an important problem and there are other people I mean there was this bogeyman sitting in America called Linus Pauling who already had two Nobel prizes not one and he was thinking about it by now Linus Pauling had turned his full attention to DNA suspiciously this coincided with a certain young playboy traveling from California to England to work in Watson and Crick's office in those days Linus had a son who was about the same age as Watson and knew Watson and and Pauling came across they came to our lab and he went and stayed with Watson and Crick and I think he put the fear of God into them that dad was thinking about this I've had a few what was he doing in the laboratory was father's big competitor I was accused of being a double agent but I don't accept that because I'd write paw and just say what I'm doing and he'd write back you know what he was interested in and paw was not only writing back to Peter he was busy writing other letters too i wrote to wilkins at the king's college asking if I could have prints of the photographs that he had obtained but I my effort was not successful back at King's College London they had made an astonishing discovery the scattered dots of light that suggest how the atoms of DNA might be arranged were coming into sharp focus rosalind franklin had taken this the clearest picture yet the X pattern indicated the DNA ingredients are arranged in a spiral what scientists call a helix but rosalind Franklin wasn't letting anyone else see it so Linus Pauling never got his hands on this X pattern could he have come up with the right answer without seeing the Kings data because I hoped he couldn't it wasn't until you know but the last day of January the Peter came in after lunch and had a manuscript I had a letter from my father in December 52 saying he had proposed a structure for DNA so I told the boys oh they rushed over my stomach sank and I yeah I was scared that's all what was gonna be in and opened it and read it and they discovered you know that it it it was wrong what got into Linus Pauling's model not only didn't fit the data it also failed to explain anything about what DNA did he had blundered by trying to get the structure with too little information it wasn't any ambi good as to whether life is was right or wrong is is wrong it's in the field so we were both pleased and a bit scared because maybe someone at caltech River hotel - this is chemical nonsense little did we know that you know no one at Caltech really had the courage to tell Linus it was wrong Linus was like the poop - wasn't used to people saying he was wrong so I've had a very fortunate life I thought the people of King's it should be relieved so without being si said well just take the manuscript down to the Kings I just bubbling over with the fact that we had another chance calling it God is wrong and we should go into action fast [Music] watson was still not even supposed to be working on DNA but he took the risk of going to King's again I didn't have that much time and what does something to happen now so I went down and look for Morris and didn't spot him and so until we were Roslyn Sophos was so when tour dates and walked in she wasn't there you know I wasn't trying to read the letters on her desk or anything like that but obviously I was looking around she came in someone had told her I was looking for her she had a very negative reaction to me fury was rising she didn't think I should be there so I got out of the room as fast as possible and then Morris Wilkinson heard I was rather and there he was and I said oh I thought she was gonna hit me and he said oh I thought she was gonna do that to me once and so I went to her he took me to his office and over the drawer and took out a photo and there it was the cross which I had never seen in which they had basically weren't talking about it it showed this sort of X type of koksar type of cross pattern which was an indication of a helix how's that a big pie hey this was beautiful photograph because is it you the most beautiful girl in the world you're gonna see her again it was great if I got excited about the results I'd had to pass them on I know I think H I didn't feel there was any sort of bombshell in this well the picture caps are racing through my brain and I wanted to be sure I had it right so I wrote it down I was just uh super reflection of 3.4 angstroms and boom-boom-boom no one could look at and say it's not a feelings and the reason that Watson realized that it was a helix so as you get across in the diffraction path well just so happened that Crick new list bit of x-ray diffraction theory and had told Watson that an X indicated a helix this wasn't his specialty but Crick's mind was able to absorb ideas from many disciplines and now it was paying off a tendency to throw yeah I felt yeah we'll get the answer you know until then I I didn't feel we were close I thought fisherman's were close Wilkins undoubtedly and I think if you ask him he will say that he feels that he did if there were any cats to be let out of any bags he'd done it well last one is perfectly true but I think this science isn't supposed to be accepting bags no more than cats I mean I don't know what he means but I don't like it as a scientist who sort of working away and it's awesome hounam wasn't till the other scientists or something I don't think is the way to be working it's a science ought to be an open activity in so you can work as a community you have been impossible about those built bottles that after seeing that picture [Music] spring came early to Cambridge in 1953 Watson and Crick were given official permission to return to their work on DNA and by now they had managed to acquire all the information they needed chargaff's data suggested that the four chemicals in DNA might go together in pairs it was time to see how these pairs would fit together to discover whether the shape of DNA would tell them what it did the Cavendish shop was to build us some tea models and that took too long and you know finally in desperation I made some other cardboard the sort of finished the job on Friday and didn't get back into the Cavendish couple until much before 9:30 and Saturday morning so I came in the morning and I began moving them around and and one of the arrangement you know where I had a big and a small so how did you do it somehow you had the form linked bonds you so I here's a a and here's T and I wanted this hydrogen to point directly at this nitrogen so I had something like this Oh so then I went to they would repair and weather this nitrogen went to this one looked like this whoa they look the same so we had two base pairs identical champ and what I could hardly believe franklin's photos suggested these pairs had to fit into some kind of helix and when they saw that the pairs were the same shape they realized that they could stack on top of each other you gonna push right on top or the other and they realized that deform a helix they not only stacked on top of each other but they also twist it around like the steps in a spiral staircase onwards and upwards in their minds the double helix structure of DNA emerged so you can have small one big ones for any sequence [Music] we know you could just you know even if we go up to the ceiling really a tiny fraction Marco [Music] pyromania of these base pairs in one lock so i'm leave like all united by this year eighty ta GC CJ all fitting into this wonderful symmetry which we saw the morning of february 28 1953 the double helix was a structure that revealed far more about the way life works than they could ever have dreamed of they'd been looking for something that could divide just like cells do and it was easy to see how a double helix could unwind and form two more double helixes they'd been trying to find out if DNA was the script or instructions for all living things they realized that the millions of G's is T's and C's must be written in some kind of code the script of life and they even saw how the script could be copied exactly as the double helix unwinds each of the letters forms a new pair and because a always goes with T and G always goes with C the resulting two pieces of DNA are exact copies of the original enabling the script to be passed from cell to cell and ultimately from generation to generation it was clear now DNA was the molecule that controlled all living things Watson and Crick ran straight to the pub where their news was going to be hard to believe it was hard to contain the fact that you know maybe we're a gigantic breakthrough we'd done something really important Joe had discovered the secret of life you could say that day was the beginning of the new genetics they had the idea but now they wanted to check that it was right they said about building a 10 model as quickly as they could cross-checking their coordinates with the King's data it all fit then we had to tell the people with kings and a little bit apprehensive because we didn't know how to say well were we beaten you you have to remember that I'd beam up before and seen the model that was wrong and that gave us a buzz in a high and then you go up there and you see this thing it looked right when you saw it it was so brilliantly elegantly simple I thought oh my god we got scooped because I really thought we were going to come up with something like that ourselves it was terrible you know for Morris I double helix was a somewhat similar to a a young baby standing there all alive and saying I don't care what you say or what you think I know I am right Roselyn would have been appalled to learn that they had taken quite so much detail of her current work and put it into their model I can will behave you know right or wrong or where we good or bad guys depends on your set of values and the facts you have the extent to which rosalind franklin was badly treated is still debated to this day she's an enigmatic character who kept her distance from the other people in this story she spent her time working alone in her lab people have wondered how close she came to finding the structure of DNA the only way to know is to visit this archive in Cambridge where her notebooks are kept her her notes suggest that she nearly got there in one of her final entries she's thinking in terms of a to chain or double helix but that's as far as she got she died five years later in 1958 without ever being told the extent to which Watson and Crick had used her data and when the Nobel prizes were awarded for the discovery they went to Watson and Crick and Morris Wilkins she didn't get one because Nobel Prizes can't be awarded posthumously people who knew her say that what she cared about most was that her work moved science forward it was one of the few things she had in common with Morris Wilkins without their work Watson and Crick could not have built this model and the model was just the beginning over the next two decades scientists delved into the molecular world of DNA and discovered how it actually controls life the genius who did more than anyone to unravel its mysteries was Francis Crick today he's at the Salk Institute in California in one interview that has never before been broadcast Crick did talk about what for him came after the double helix it involves thinking beyond what he calls the narrow limits of normal human experience now when you want to understand the world you have to go you have to go beyond those narrow limits both heads up and down both in space and time and then you find that there's a uniformity and extraordinary things happening which you've no idea of just looking at the world and it's this is the fascination of science really I think to uncover so much which is not apparent just in everyday life today we have a way to see the molecular world this is what DNA looks like when you put the very latest scientific data into a computer simulator it's a long way from tinker toy models what is apparent is that everything in the molecular world is more strange and sophisticated than anyone had thought biological systems are the result of evolution and they produce very complicated things now the reason that DNA look looks so beautiful and simple is it goes right back to near the origins of life where things had to be simple but if you actually look at the actual process of DNA replication it isn't at all the way that it we used to describe all sorts of funny things happen you have to have proteins which will unwind the helix and Nick it and then join it together again you get an enormous Lee the rock complicated apparatus which what makes a molecular gadget or E which actually does the job this is the incredible way DNA copies itself but DNA is much more than a self-replicating molecule it is the essence of life carrying from generation to generation the information needed to make all living things written in the DNA language of A's C's GS and T's Francis Crick wanted to crack this genetic code to understand the complete process of life to achieve this would involve deconstructing the gadgets of the molecular world he started by working backwards but sometimes called reverse engineering it happens in the commercial world when one firm produces a gadget and another firm buys it and tries to take it to pieces and find how it works that's called reverse engineering but in our case its reverse engineering what you might call a foreign culture as a result of that process today it's possible to see how DNA makes living things how DNA's code is turned into flesh and blood and for scientists life is no longer a mystery the blue molecule racing down the DNA unzips the double helix and copies one of the two strands [Music] this copy is then released for the next stage of the process the yellow copy feeds into another machine which deciphers the code and orders up the right components one unit at a time from the surrounding chemical soup [Music] the product of this machine is protein [Music] this could be a thousandth of an eyebrow the same process could make a Tiger's Claw or part of the wings of a dove it's the same for all life what is made is all down to the DNA the specific order of the chemical code and today these machines can read that DNA code how a person is made is being revealed how our brains are built is being explained in the G a is T's and C's they're beginning to read differences in our characters and personality the genetics of of human nature is slowly unfolding even our story can be seen in this way the fate of our characters determined by their individual natures I thought the problem would last me my lifetime I don't I did it would be so within 20 years you see I was I mean it was embarrassing almost I got to the stage when instead of this problem lasting for one's life one had to look round for another problem now Francis Crick is trying to find out how the brain works he's always only been interested in making new discoveries Jim Watson runs Cold Spring Harbor laboratories on Long Island in New York he employs 800 people and is still at the cutting edge of DNA science he had a house built on the grounds and erected an enormous sculpture of the double helix he travels the world giving lectures and arguing for the benefits of genetic engineering there are people who say well we're playing God and you know I have a straightforward answer if we don't play God who will [Applause] [Music] and Morris Wilkins couldn't be more different having worked on the atomic bomb he chose to study DNA because he thought it wouldn't be controversial today is the newspapers talk of creating designer babies and the birth of human clones he lectures at King's College London about the social responsibility of science he hopes the human race will use this knowledge wisely [Music] [Applause] [Music] you you [Music]